Suchergebnisse

Medicine and disease in North Việt Nam: doctoring the body politic -- Water and infrastructure in transition -- Risky (small) business: constructing a disease of the market -- Sacrificial beasts: disease risk at the species boundary -- Statistics and their discontents -- Conclusion: in the republic of health.

This article examines the shifting biopolitical significance of poverty in Vietnam's post-reform period, drawing on ethnographic interviews with poor Hanoians. Concomitant with the political economic and sociocultural shifts of market transition, public accounts of poverty's nature and causes have transformed. The diminished national prevalence of poverty, rapid macroeconomic growth, and the ethos of "socialization" inform accounts that depoliticize deprivation and present it in biopolitical terms, as an inherent characteristic of some social groups. Economic and policy transformations mean that low-income urban residents navigate competing obligations under market socialism: to be as self-reliant as possible while remaining legible as legitimately deserving.

Market transition in Vietnam is known to have fueled health disparities, but racialized and nationality-linked aspects of the country's medical stratification have received less attention, despite the growing presence of foreigners using the health system. Field experiences reveal the country's increasing health and medical inequity – legible in the social, linguistic, economic, and physical distinctions between public health stations staffed by government employees and the private clinics serving mostly expatriates. Ethnographic interviews and experiences of receiving care in both public and private facilities inform my argument that the privatization of Vietnam's health sector produces racialized, classed, and citizenship-linked forms of medical profit, privilege, segregation, and risk – trends visible both in recent debates over US health policy and recent episodes of pandemic disease outbreak.

The administration and management of life, health, and populations—or "biopolitics"—have long been a tacit concern of scholars of historic and contemporary Vietnam. Yet to date, there has been relatively little formal treatment of the constructs of biopolitics or biopower by scholars working in the field of Vietnamese studies. Noting the rich evidence for a "biopolitical Vietnam" already extant in interdisciplinary literatures, this introduction to the special issue explores the potential analytic and disciplinary payoffs of yet more focused and intentional inquiries into the politics of life across Vietnamese contexts.

AbstractWhile cross-disciplinary analysis of ghosts and haunting has burgeoned in recent decades, much of this scholarship presumes the figure of the ghost as a less than literal apparition. We propose that writers such as Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, who make use of the ghostly as a trope, are in fact describing a phenomenon we term secondary haunting, distinct from accounts of unquiet spirits who address the living directly with specific demands for redress: a visceral and often frightening experience we term primary haunting. Drawing on a contemporary account of the ghosts of a massacre in a Vietnamese village, we explore the complex interaction of primary and secondary haunting, the different kinds of memory work they engage in and the different moral communities they mobilize.